Goat Chilli – Getting My Fix.

Tension

It’s a biting cold winter afternoon. I’m parked up in the car park of a West Dublin pub. She is late. The deal may not go down the way I had hoped. My mind is racing. “Is that the Garda (Irish police) in the blue Toyota?”“The crew in the red van look fairly sketch”. “What if this handover goes wrong?” This is my first deal. I am nervous.

Handover

A small white refrigerated van crawls into the car park and rolls to a halt, driver’s window to driver’s window. My contact identifies herself. We both get out. The deal is going down. I’m taking one and a quarter keys (kilos to the non dealers]. I count out the notes. She checks my count. The last thing she does is give me a number to ring for future deals. Two minutes later, I am back on the motorway. The deal has gone down and I am not being followed.

Recipe

I get the stash back to the ‘kitchen’. I open the pack. I’m not going to need to cut it before cooking it. My supplier delivered good product – Buying goat meat shouldn’t be such a big deal. I had just met the lovely Ami from Goat Ireland in Galway. She had diverted to meet me on a delivery trip to customers in Dublin. Goat is not that easy to get hereabouts and acting like a crim is all part of the fun, it seems. Having gone to this trouble, I wanted to do justice to the meat. A Goat Chili seemed like a good idea. It was.

Ingredients

1.25 kilos of lean goat meat, cubed.

500ml of good beef / chicken or vegetable stock

800 gms of best quality copped tomatoes (use whole tinned instead)

6 onions

3 bell peppers

500ml of beer

2 limes

2 bay leaves

2 teaspoons of cumin seeds

1 teaspoon of smoked salt (don’t panic if you don’t have smoked)

1 teaspoon of black pepper

2 teaspoons of tomato puree

1 teaspoon of hot paprika (if you think you can handle the heat)

5 kinds of dried chilli

Pasilla

Ancho

Chipotle

Mulato

Harbanero

Place the chillis in a bowl and add about 500ml of boiling water.

Lots of layers of flavour. The chilli mix allows you control the heat too.

Slice the onions into eights. Do likewise with the peppers, discarding the seeds and stalks. Brown the meat in a little oil, in a big casserole dish. Be warned, goat meat is very lean and you need to be sure to not burn it in this part of the process. It helps to brown it well. This provides a lovely bit of brown for the final chilli colour.

The goat meat is very lean, healthy and delicious.

Remove the stalks from the chillis (much easier after they have soaked for half an hour). Make a decision on leaving the seeds in the chillis (hot) or removing them (mild, ya wuss!) before blending the chillis and their soaking water into a delightful paste.

The chilli slurry has a wonderful aroma and colour.

When all the goat meat is browned, remove and reserve. Add the onions to the casserole, turn down the heat, add a splash of the beer. Cover and sweat the onions. When they are translucent add in all the other ingredients, bar the hot paprika and limes.

That’s half a litre of my best homemade beef stock. All in a good cause.

I like to add the chilli mixture last. It has such a lovely colour.

Rich red-brown chilli mixture. The backbone of the dish.

Bring the dish to a gentle boil before skimming off the foam (this is most of the oil too). Place it in a 180ºC oven for a couple of hours. Remove the lid for the last thirty minutes to allow the dish concentrate. Keep an eye on it as it should not be let dry out. At this stage, taste and adjust the heat with some of the paprika. I didn’t add much as I like the other flavours to have a chance to impress. Just before serving, squeeze in the lime juice from one or both of the limes.

A delightful end result. Deeply flavoured, robust goat chilli.

We served this with cornbread. That is really easy to make and excellent with things like sun dried tomato cut through. Here’s a link to a previous one I have done. Go lighter on the sugar if you think it’s too much. In recent times, I have halved the sugar content and the bread is better for it in my maturing opinion.

This is a truly delightful, rich, wholesome chilli. Get some goat and give it a go. You could become addicted to it.

Footnote on availability: Goat meat is healthy, tasty and a bit more available than it used to be. Paul and Ami at Goat Ireland, and a few other producers are doing a good job. We just need more demand. I know a few better butchers are starting to stock goat. This is what I want to see. That way, I won’t be reduced to doing clandestine deals in parking lots for my goat fix.

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The suspense was ‘killing’, The ‘story’ reads great. The recipe looks and sounds ever so delectable. Methinks I have even been able to source goat – well, perhaps! Both for your and John’s dishes . . . hmm! And now you expect me to find five kinds of dried chillies in rural Australia . . . OK: so far can do ancho and chipotle . . . . in five minutes search when I should already have said my evening prayers . . . am not giving up, Conor, but oh jeez . . . . 🙂 !!

Sorry for putting you to all this trouble Eha. A decent bit of mutton would do this just as well, if you can secure the chilli. Mail me your home address to conorbofin at gmail.com and I will pop a few in the post to you. Assuming that the border protection people don’t bin it and raid your house as a result, it will be worthwhile. I got my original stash of chilis from the late great Richard McGary in Texas. It would be great to move it along a bit.

With chipotle and ancho you have the two most important ones (smoky and earthy). Would be nice if you could also find a fruity one. And as for the goat: I challenge anyone to distinguish between lamb and goat chilli in a blind tasting…

Too true, when we have so many flavours added. Mind you, they say that it is practically impossible to tell the difference between Guinness and lager in blind taste tests. We eat with our eyes, as the old saying goes.

That’s absolutely perfect for the current cold weather and personally I’d eat it in summer too! It’s quite ridiculous that goat is in short supply when there’s so much goats milk and cheese available. I suppose a lot of it must go for pet food due to lack of demand. It’s fairly easy to find in London at Halal butchers, but it’s absent in regular butchers and supermarkets.

Thanks MD. The guys in Goat Ireland would be happy for it to be more readily available. However, there needs to be consumer ‘pull’ as well as retailer ‘push’ as they used to teach me in marketing class.

With five different chilies in there I question whether one would be able to dial up the heat any more with hot paprika! 😀 Great way to lead into the recipe. I was kind of hoping the coppers would pull you over just for the fun of the story! 😉

It would have been great fun to be pulled over by the law with an illicit bag of goat. Though, I do recall being pulled over in New Jersey and given a stiff talking to by an armed patrol officer. We don’t do guns so much here in Ireland and it can be a bit off-putting.

I like it when you ‘kid’ me Melissa. You are one of the few people I know who has an ample supply of goat. I am a flip-flopper on the beans issue. My Texas friends recoil in horror at the bare prospect of a bean in a chilli.I am more sanguine and now believe that anything goes as long as it tastes great. I hope all is well with you. Best, Conor

Am putting an answer to the above down here: it would land on its bottom anyway 🙂 ! Thank you Conor for your very kind offer – much appreciated, but have found another one during the day from a Mexican store in Sydney which promises to send. Three-four out of five will do!! A golden side to this: during my endless server problems last year my address book was ‘lost’ by some techie or other – amongst many email addresses gone was yours: well, ‘back in the book’ now much to my delight ! . . . Richard: there is a monument to him in so many hearts . . . . you could not build such in stone or marble . . . . thanks again . . . .

Yesterday, the butcher was placing newly-butchered goat into the display case and I was immediately reminded of this post, Conor. Yes, this does sound wonderful. I hope to give it a try before our weather warms. That should give me at least 3 months. 🙂

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When I am not working, I like to cook for my family and friends. Since starting this blog, I have won the Best Newcomer in the Blog Awards Ireland in 2012, and Best Food and Drink Blog in the Blog Awards Ireland 2013, Best Food and Drink Blog the Blog Awards Ireland 2014 and Best Overall Blog 2014, Finalist in Blog Awards Ireland 2015, been featured on Freshly Pressed in 2015 and won Best Food Blog in the 2016 Blog Awards Ireland, so I must be doing something right.
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